TIme Bomb

In the next seventy years, the way the world does agriculture will drastically change in ways mankind is not prepared for. This is because of the scarcely discussed threat of the world phosphorous shortage.

In the mid-twentieth century, advances in technology spurred the Green Revolution. This revolution was built primarily around the mining of phosphorous for use as a fertilizer. This allowed farms to yield increasingly larger and larger crops, allowing the population to grow as food became more more and more abundant.

Cataloging the numerous ways in which big agriculture and phosphorous fertilizer is detrimental to the environment (such as the fact that unnaturally high concentrations of phosphorous drain from farmlands into our rivers and watersheds, effectively fertilizing those bodies of water, which promotes the overgrowth of algae in a process known as eutrophication that chokes out all other aquatic life in the area creating increasingly huge dead zones, such as the Mississippi River delta) is beyond the scope of this editorial. This editorial will focus instead on the fragility of the infrastructure that we have built around big agriculture, which is entirely dependent on phosphorous fertilizer.

There is less phosphorous remaining in the world than there is crude oil. And we've been waring over depleting oil supplies for years. What's truly disturbing is that we could survive just fine without oil. If global oil reserves mysteriously vanished tomorrow, it would shakes the world's economies, but we wouldn't see the sort of famine that is promised to us when phosphorous runs out.

Yet more disturbing is the promise of war over this dwindling resource. Morocco controls over 40% of the world's phosphorous supple. China controls almost as much. Making these regions geostrategic timebombs. It is the duty of our leaders in office to ensure a safe and prosperous tomorrow by having the initiative to foresee and circumvent these threats, even if it means dismantling big industriess like agriculte.

If the world's governments don't take drastic and immediate actions to restructure our food supply we will soon be fighting wars not for the luxury of oil, but for the first time in hundreds of years, very tools to sustain life.